Archie Goes Home

Author’s Note

In his Nero Wolfe stories, Rex Stout offered only a smattering of clues as to Archie Goodwin’s life before he moved to New York and eventually joined forces with Nero Wolfe. We know that Archie was reared in Ohio, possibly in Chillicothe or Canton, had three or maybe four siblings, and, in his own words, in the Stout novella Fourth of July Picnic (from the collection And Four to Go), “attended public high school, pretty good at geometry and football, graduated with honor but no honors. Went to college two weeks, decided it was childish...”

We also know Archie’s father was named either James Arner or Titus and that his mother’s maiden name was Leslie. And we know from Stout’s writing that Archie’s mother had visited him in Manhattan and that she had met Nero Wolfe.

Taking these and a few other random mentions in the Stout books of Archie’s early years, I stitched together a partial backstory for Archie in this narrative, which is set at least a decade beyond the midpoint of the twentieth century. This becomes the final story in what has become, without my intending it, an “Archie Trilogy,” the other two volumes being Archie Meets Nero Wolfe and Archie in the Crosshairs.

Among the works that were helpful in gaining insight into Rex Stout’s body of work regarding Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin were: Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, by William S. Baring-Gould (New York: Viking Press, 1969); The Nero Wolfe Cookbook, by Rex Stout and the Editors of Viking Press (New York: Viking Penguin, 1973); The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe, by Ken Darby as told by Archie Goodwin (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1983); and Rex Stout, a Biography, by John McAleer (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1977). The McAleer book justly won an Edgar Award in the biography category from the Mystery Writers of America.

As with all my previous Wolfe stories, I thank Rex Stout’s daughter, Rebecca Bradbury, for her enduring support and friendship. My thanks also go to Otto Penzler and Charles Perry of Mysterious Press for their encouragement, to my valued agent, Martha Kaplan, and to the fine team at Open Road Integrated Media for keeping me on track regarding style, usage, and continuity.

And my most heartfelt feelings go to my wife, Janet, a girl from Ohio, no less, who took a chance on a wisecracking and cocky young newspaperman in Chicago so many decades ago.